Eastern European film-makers basked in the limelight at the weekend after two low-budget pictures snapped up the top prizes at Berlin's international film festival.

The Berlinale's first prize, the Golden Bear, was awarded to a quasi-documentary-style Romanian film, Pozitia Copilului, or Child's Pose, directed by Calin Peter Netzer, a standard-bearer for the critically acclaimed new wave of film-making in his country. Starring Luminita Gheorghiu in a fearsome performance, the film tells the story of a mother's desperate and often illegal attempts to save her son from prosecution after he knocks down and kills an impoverished teenager.

Netzer said it reflected the "moral malaise of Romania's corruption-ridden middle classes". It also fitted the festival's penchant for delivering contemporary social drama with a strong political message.

The Bosnian documentary drama An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker, by Danis Tanovic, won two prizes, including the Silver Bear best actor award for Nazif Mujic, the real-life protagonist of the €17,000 budget film about a Roma couple excluded from life-saving medical treatment.

The best screenplay award went to Parde, or Closed Curtain, by the dissident Iranian directors Jafar Panahi and Kambuzia Partovi. Telling the tale of a group of people trapped in a house by a lake, it was made in secret after Tehran banned Panahi from film-making.

Accepting the award on behalf of himself and Panahi, who is under house arrest, Partovi said: "It is impossible to stop a thinker and a poet. Their thoughts bear fruit everywhere."

Paulina Garcia won a Silver Bear for best actress for her role in Sebastian Lelio's Gloria from Chile, an intimate portrait of a society trapped in its grim fascist past. Gold, a heartfelt documentary by Michael Hammon that intimately followed the lives of three Paralympians who competed in London 2012, might have gone away empty-handed but proved to be a favourite with the audience, taking them on an emotional rollercoaster ride with its medal-winning protagonists, a cyclist, a swimmer and runner, who appeared at its premiere.

Child's Pose and Iron Picker reflected the strong showing at this year's festivals by films from the former communist bloc, and highlighted the new frictions, divisions and widespread corruption that are rife in many parts of the region.

The current affairs magazine Der Spiegel said it was a credit to the festival, now in its 63rd year and with its roots in the cold war, that such low-budget films could pip much bigger players at the post.

The magazine's critic said: "€17,000 and amateur actors are enough to beat the arthouse productions with budgets in the millions at a major film festival when a moving story is told well and beautifully."

The critic added: "That is the message this Berlinale jury is sending to all the film-makers from eastern Europe, a region often ignored by Cannes and Venice, whose citizens are struggling with the social upheaval of post-communism."

Another well-received section of the festival, curated by the German Film Archive and New York's Museum of Modern Art, was The Weimar Touch, which focused on the loss to German cinema when the Nazis drove out many of its star directors in the 1930s. More than 30 films by persecuted directors illustrated how Hitler inadvertently "created Hollywood".

While it lacks the glamour of Cannes or Venice, the Berlinale – the first major European film festival of the year – has a reputation as the most democratic of the larger film festivals. While it enjoys a certain element of glamour, rolling out the red carpet this year for an impressive array of stars including Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche, Nicolas Cage, Jonathan Pryce and even Status Quo, it also revels in its non-exclusive, public-friendly image, giving the public access to all 400-plus films.